Apr 20, 2015

This is the Way the World Ends

Charlie of Imaginary Hallways is running a campaign that'll be moving through Necrocarcerus at one point and he very kindly asked me some questions about the setting as a result. One of the ones he asked me was a pretty common one, which is what the end of the Necrocarcerus Program looks like? Rather than provide a definitive answer, this is what I wrote:

"What I actually do is keep on making up new ways for the Program to end, and new goals for it, and then I insert each new idea in as another faction of Guardians or rogues. Here are some of the current ones:

1) Necrocarcerus has a giant space-dragon living on the top of the dome, and the dragon eats souls. The end of the Program is when Necrocarcerus is finally so full of incarnated souls that the dragon rips off the dome and consumes everyone inside of it, then flies off through the infinite void to find another island of reality to brood over and consume.

2) The disc of Necrocarcerus flips, plunging almost everyone on it into the infinite void. A new cycle begins on what was once the underside of the disc, with new living worlds feeding into it. The Program is supposed to have a purpose, but because the transmission was incomplete it was never finished correctly and so the whole thing is a colossal malfunctioning machine that just cycles endlessly.

3) Necrocarcerus was meant as a vast factory for the production of gods, allowing a rare few Citizens within it to attain the personal power required to transcend material existence completely and become divine beings. The end of the Program is when one or more of these individuals reaches that level of power. The whole factory shuts down for a single eternal moment, all the souls that haven't transcended are absorbed back into it, and the whole cycle starts over again, less one soul. The process repeats until everyone who will everyone who will ever come to Necrocarcerus is a god.

4) The same, but the Guardians are the beings who become gods, not the Citizens.

5) The same, but everyone in Necrocarcerus merges into a single divine being, instead of just one or a handful of individuals. That divine being is the Creator, who then uses its omnipotence to reach back in time and create the conditions of its own creation.

6) Portals open up everywhere, and all the inhabitants and objects in Necrocarcerus are thrown back into the living worlds. The Program was intended to prevent the merger of the living worlds and the afterlife, but due to its incompleteness, it broke down and now there is no more life and death, but merely existence and nullity, with the entire multiverse becoming a badly-built hellscape.

7) The same, but the Program was always intended to do this, and is a plot by the Creator to this end against the gods and the multiverse. The Creator was long dead, but now that that state is meaningless, it reconstitutes and becomes the sovereign of all reality (and either its dark plan, or Paradise results, no one can agree which).

8) Nothing happens. It was all propaganda to keep the system running. The Guardians and AUC start trying to delete people's memories of this and institute a new 10,000 year count. They destroy the material remnants of the previous aeon and pretend to have to create the world anew."I will, undoubtedly come up with more in time. I know what the end is going to be in the current Necrocarcerus game unless the PCs interfere (and I'm keeping it a secret until it happens), but feel free to mix, match, and create new options as you please. The actual end of the world is the least interesting part for me, it's the fact that it's ending and the reactions to that fact that I find interesting.